There ought to be decent number of people within Microsoft who have "Copilot usage" as a KPI. I don't think this was gamesmanship on their part (no sarcasm, I truly do not suspect malice), but I'm sure if it could have slipped in without backlash, they would have enjoyed seeing their line go up.
I'm not sure that anyone wants the scarlet letter of an AI coauthor on their code just because they used something simple like next edit suggestions or AI autocomplete. It seems like the "all" setting basically only exists for people that haven't figured out how to change it to something else yet.
(Funnily enough, I always commit through the command line in VS code anyways...not sure why. But I guess I would have avoided this annoyance, so that's a plus!)
Agree. I'm more reliant on having a keyboard than on having copilot make tab suggestions and I wouldn't like my PRs to include a tag: "Keystrokes courtesy of: Keychron K3 Max".
It's only one sliver of the problem here, but -- do you know how often I update my code editor? Like once every five or ten years, to the version that was released a year or two ago.
I do my own commits by hand so it's moot anyway, but there's a fair bit of "leopards ate my face" going in the GitHub thread.
VSCode updates itself what feels like daily so everyone is on the bleeding edge. There are upsides and downsides to that but it doesn’t feel like a trade-off many have made purposefully.
Are they apologizing? Was it a bug? Why did they make this decision and what's the end goal? It's so unclear from the message - as evidenced by a lot of the responses.
Seems pretty clear, Claude and Codex were getting a lot of free publicity by instructing their models to do the same and MS wanted similar results. However, a bug caused this to be applied to all commits instead of all Copilot-influenced commits.
It's not even default to ON, it's default to ALL (or at least to a lot), even non co-pilot commits, that's what made people made. If it was at least correct maybe it would have gone unnoticed.
I recall there was some understanding that it had a legitimate use as well as the obvious marketing, which was to advise the reader that the message may be unexpectedly concise or contain errors because it was sent from a cell phone, something less common before the iPhone came out. BlackBerry phones did this too for the same reasons.
You misunderstand the purpose of "Sent from my iPhone" - it was a status symbol, it showed that the sender was part of the superior iPhone owning elite. It was trivial to remove, but most didnt "oh, I am too busy too remove it, I guess I'll just leave it and let everybody know I can afford an iPhone".
You are right, it was advertising, but it advertized the user, not Apple.
Honestly extremely pathetic by a trillion dollar corporation that has a massive, undemocratic, say in how technology is developed in this country.
Microsoft should be broken up into a dozen different companies and it's quite clear they violated their consent decree from the US DOJ a few decades later, so they should get punished extra hard. Maybe nationalize Excel putting it in the public domain for starters.
Yeah break up all the big companies so Chinese state sponsored behemoths can take over everything. This isn’t the 90s where Americans only competed with other Americans.
> We did catch it internally in testing [1]
Today:
> There was a bug in the code that was not found in testing
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47994193
(Funnily enough, I always commit through the command line in VS code anyways...not sure why. But I guess I would have avoided this annoyance, so that's a plus!)
The bug is not about code behavior, but rather about getting noticed by users :)
`user.email` is always my email.
`user.name` is either my account name, or model name like `gpt-5.5-high`.
I can easily filter & blame which line was written by me or some specific AI
I do my own commits by hand so it's moot anyway, but there's a fair bit of "leopards ate my face" going in the GitHub thread.
“Sent from my iPhone” isn’t an authorship claim.
There is something so gross about injecting an advertising message into every single communication a user has on their device.
You are right, it was advertising, but it advertized the user, not Apple.
I also recommend specifying model name and version so the maintainer knows upfront the level of slop they are dealing with.
I don't want my computer to look like it's racing in NASCAR.
Microsoft should be broken up into a dozen different companies and it's quite clear they violated their consent decree from the US DOJ a few decades later, so they should get punished extra hard. Maybe nationalize Excel putting it in the public domain for starters.